BILLINGHAM HADLEY SMALL PRO CAMERA BAG, £200
Billingham is a name that’s better known to photographers than birders. This family firm has been making camera bags in England since 1973 – canvas bags, with leather and brass fittings – that’s what comes to mind. These days, plenty of birders carry cameras, and of course, you can put things that aren’t cameras into a Billingham bag.
The bag
The Hadley Small Pro was added to the range in 2018. As you might expect, it’s very well made, with a high-quality padded insert that provides six-sided protection and has moveable dividers. I used it with the ‘lid’ tucked behind for easy access. The insert can be removed leaving you with a stylish shoulder bag. The bag itself is made of three-layer ‘Stormblock’ fabric and top-grain leather. Stormblock has a middle layer of butyl rubber and maintains its weather resistance without re-proofing. There are two good-sized pockets on the front, with poppered flaps and a poppered corner – release this for more pocket, or leave secured for a pen slot. The slip pocket on the rear has a waterproof zip, and there’s a trolley strap to secure the bag to the handle of your wheel-about luggage. The top flap is ‘tailored’ to keep even determined rain out of the bag, and there’s a leather-lined grab handle as well as the webbing shoulder strap. A metal ‘clogball’ is used to secure the leather straps that lock the flap down. You just slide the clogball through an opening in the leather.
In use
This is a small bag – the clue is in the name – but it can swallow a fair amount of gear. I loaded it with a Lumix G6 (a compact system camera) with my 100-300mm lens on, plus a 14-140mm lens, a 60mm macro lens, my ipad Mini and a spare battery, and headed off to Fen Drayton. The sun shone and there were Hobbies in the air. The bag didn’t feel heavy and was big enough for the superzoom with the lens hood on – it did stick out the top a bit but that wasn’t a problem. I had also been sent a very nice shoulder pad – with this, there was no slipping off the shoulder. I used the bag on another occasion, at Ouse Fen, where Bittern boomed and Garden and Grasshopper Warblers added themselves to #My200birdyear. I didn’t use the shoulder pad here, but there was still no slippage. This may of course, depend on the fabric you’re wearing. I don’t recommend loading the bag to capacity – when you change a big lens for something smaller, you may have too little space to store the unmounted superzoom. The flap poppers were a bit too stiff for my liking, but with use may loosen up, and I would have found a small divider with velcro at both ends useful – for storing a smaller lens under and to one side of the camera with a large lens attached.
Verdict
For me, this Billingham is too small, but there are bigger bags in their range – it just depends on what you want to carry. £200 is a hefty price tag but this bag’s build quality is such that it’s likely to last you a very long time, and do a very good job of protecting your gear along the way. It’s a very good bag.